Beacon Lights of History, Volume 11 eBook

The best and latest work on Washington is that of
the Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge, and leaves little more
to be said; Marshall’s Washington has long been
a standard; Botta’s History of the Revolutionary
War; Bancroft’s United States; McMaster’s
History of the American People. In connection
read the standard lives of Franklin, John Adams, Hamilton,
Jefferson, Jay, Marshall, La Fayette, and Greene,
with Washington’s writings. John Fiske
has written an admirable book on Washington’s
military career; indeed his historical series on the
early history of America and the United States are
both brilliant and trustworthy. Of the numerous
orations on Washington, perhaps the best is that of
Edward Everett.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

A. D. 1757-1804.

THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION.

There is one man in the political history of the United
States whom Daniel Webster regarded as his intellectual
superior. And this man was Alexander Hamilton;
not so great a lawyer or orator as Webster, not so
broad and experienced a statesman, but a more original
genius, who gave shape to existing political institutions.
And he rendered transcendent services at a great crisis
of American history, and died, with no decline of
popularity, in the prime of his life, like Canning
in England, with a brilliant future before him.
He was one of those fixed stars which will forever
blaze in the firmament of American lights, like Franklin,
Washington, and Jefferson; and the more his works are
critically examined, the brighter does his genius appear.
No matter how great this country is destined to be,—­no
matter what illustrious statesmen are destined to
arise, and work in a larger sphere with the eyes of
the world upon them,—­Alexander Hamilton
will be remembered and will be famous for laying one
of the corner-stones in the foundation of the American
structure.

He was not born on American soil, but on the small
West India Island of Nevis. His father was a
broken-down Scotch merchant, and his mother was a
bright and gifted French lady, of Huguenot descent.
The Scotch and French blood blended, is a good mixture
in a country made up of all the European nations.
But Hamilton, if not an American by birth, was American
in his education and sympathies and surroundings, and
ultimately married into a distinguished American family
of Dutch descent. At the age of twelve he was
placed in the counting-house of a wealthy American
merchant, where his marked ability made him friends,
and he was sent to the United States to be educated.
As a boy he was precocious, like Cicero and Bacon;
and the boy was father of the man, since politics
formed one of his earliest studies. Such a precocious
politician was he while a student in King’s College,
now Columbia, in New York, that at the age of seventeen
he entered into all the controversies of the day,
and wrote essays which, replying to pamphlets attacking
Congress over the signature of “A Westchester
Farmer,” were attributed to John Jay and Governor
Livingston. As a college boy he took part in
public political discussions on those great questions
which employed the genius of Burke, and occupied the
attention of the leading men of America.